I like to tell myself that I read poetry to discover new ideas, to see the world in new ways. Sometimes when I read a book like Richard Hugo’s White Center, though, I realize I also read to rediscover old truths. Poetry can help to see the world in new ways, but it can also help us the rediscover old truths.

Since I was born in White Center and found several poems in Hugo’s Selected Poems that made me remember my childhood there, I was looking forward to more of the same in a book named after that town. I was a little disappointed, though, to discover that most of the poems seem to focus on Hugo’s adopted home, Montana.

You’ll have to forgive me, then, when I admit I was a little disappointed in these poems, though I still found several poems I liked. Perhaps, though, it was my nostalgic bent that drew me to the poems that I ended up liking the most from this slim volume.

My favorite poem,

SECOND CHANCES

I can’t let it go, the picture I keep of myself
in ruin, living alone, some wretched town
where friendship is based on just being around.
And I drink there a lot, stare at the walls until
the buzzing of flies becomes the silence I drown in.
Outside, children bad mouth my life with songs
their parents told them to sing. One showers
my roof with stones knowing I’m afraid
to step out and tell him to stop. Another yells,
“You can’t get a woman, old man. You don’t get a thing.”

My wife, a beautiful woman, is fixing lunch.
She doesn’t know I dream these things. She thinks
I’m fine. People respect me. Oh, she knows all right
I’ve seen grim times. But these days my poems
appear everywhere. Fan mail comes. I fly east
on a profitable reading tour. Once in a while
a young girl offers herself. My wife knows that, too.
And she knows my happiness with her is far more
than I ever expected. Three years ago, I wouldn’t
have given a dime for my chances at life.

What she doesn’t know is now and then
a vagabond knocks on the door. I go answer
and he says, “Come back, baby. You’ll find
a million poems deep in your destitute soul.”
And I say, “Go away. Don’t ever come back.”
But I watch him walk, always downhill toward
the schoolyard where children are playing ‘ghost,’
a game where, according to the rules, you take
another child’s name in your mind but pretend
you’re still you while others guess your new name.

reminded me once again that, no matter how much you change, who you once were is still part of who you are now. Sometimes even later success and wealth can’t change the inner feelings you had as a child. At the very least, we are left with the fears that we will end up having to relive that life. Sometimes we simply can’t believe our good luck. The juxtaposition of “You can’t get a woman, old man. You don’t get a thing/” with “My wife, a beautiful woman, is fixing lunch” instantly reveals how irrational this fear is, but whoever said fear had to be rational?

More surprising, though, is the idea suggested in the last stanza that at times there is a longing for the past, the past that everyone, likely including ourselves, would say is crazy. The truth is that most changes seem to entail a trade-off of some kind, perhaps a loss of freedom, a greater sense of obligation, or merely a sense of alienation because you somehow feel you don’t truly belong in your new situation.

I suspect I’m showing my age even more in my preference for:

CHANGES AT MERIDIAN

It’s a problem, why I’m here with amplified rock
from the resort hammering the shoreline straight
and driving the planted trout deep where catfish lived
before they were poisoned away. Coves I remember
aren’t coves anymore and perch are not welcome
since Fish and Game labeled them scrap. Where I row
the lilies seem decor. No trace of Robert’s cabin caving
under the weight of moss. No sunfish nest under the dock.
No old man, set hard in himself, rowing me home.

It’s not that no one knows me after forty years
or that at P.M. the surface reflects a world
hopelessly changed for the worse. What nags is
loss of loss, the desperate way I brought farms back
because I wanted the pastures always slanted gently
into the lake, warm reflection of willow and cow,
the old man cautioning patience days the crappie went dormant.
These don’t come anymore as if I don’t need them
and this rehabilitated water, these clustered dull homes are ok.

One poet said it is enough to live perpetually in change.
He didn’t believe it. I say we want everything static
including farms we lose and rebuild. That way,
when the fish start feeding and the first chill of day
reminds us we haven’t come far, home is a mild row back,
we love the old man repeating over and over,
“Keep your line in the water.” Change or no change,
with the right bait this world has twenty-three moons.

I guess I can comfort myself a little bit in that I left Seattle over 35 years ago because I felt precisely this way when Seattle’s population began to explode. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little like a dinosaur when you look around and your whole world has changed, and, no matter what others say, it doesn’t feel like it a change for the better. The first lake I ever hiked to and stayed for four days outside Seattle is now surrounded by estates owned by ex-Microsoft employees. No matter how fabulous their homes, I can’t convince myself they’re an improvement over the firs that used to line the shores.

Like Hugo, I can’t convince myself that is “enough to live perpetually in change.” And, like Hugo, I still miss my old man’s advice to “Keep your line in the water” and regret that I can’t take my grandson out fishing the same way my father took me out.